Now, I get that many programmers consider SQL to be too simple and noobish to be even considered a programming language. But of all languages, I think SQL stands out as not only one of the easiest to learn and practice, the sheer genius of this language is that it lets you do so much with so little expressiveness, while still trying to maintain standards across various kinds of databases as much as possible.<p>With all their expressive tokens and syntaxes, languages like C and Java and Python are often appreciated and rightly so, but I think SQL also deserves a place up there in the list of "do more with less jargon" things out there. In fact, the four basic DML/DDL statements (create, insert, update, delete) are all you need to get started with creating tables and manipulating data on most projects. And learning additional features like alter, drop, truncate, etc. is both fun and interesting.<p>And once you go even further with things like stored procedure and triggers, the real fun then begins! If you consider the below stored procedure of some hypothetical SQL dialect, it is no less elegant than any of the other popular expressive languages like Python or Ruby, don't you agree?<p><pre><code> create or replace procedure foo:
begin
select @test = select foo from bar;
-- statement 2;
-- statement 2;
-- statement 3;
end;</code></pre>